Kono

Kono country lies in the interior of eastern Sierra Leone. Its Mande-speaking communities preserve traditions of migration from the direction of Guinea and of an earlier connection with the Vai. In one widely recorded account the migrants travelled in search of salt. The Kono stayed where game and suitable farming land were available, while the Vai continued toward the coast. The narrative explains both kinship between the peoples and their different homelands.

These traditions place settlement within the movements that reshaped Upper Guinea before colonial rule, though their chronology varies. Museum accounts associate Kono settlement with approximately the sixteenth century. The land also contains much older traces of occupation, including stone figures known as pomdo, whose makers cannot simply be equated with later inhabitants. Kono's early history therefore includes successive layers of settlement and remembered migration. Farming land, hunting country and access to goods from elsewhere occupy the centre of its origin traditions, long before diamond mining transformed the region's economy.